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1/25/2015 THE BOOKS OF CIVILISATION | OPEN Magazine

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16 January 2015

THE BOOKS OF CIVILISATION

The Murty Classical Library of India is a love marriage of delicious elegance between new money and old glory

7T A G G E D U N D E R | Hindu | Indian literature | NR Narayana Murthy | MurtyClass ical Library of India | Manucaritramu | Sursagar

O P E N E S S AY

Tunku Varadarajan is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is

working on a book on the political legacy of the Shah Bano case, The Divorce That Rocked India. He is a regular contributor

to Open

If the Bharat Ratna has not been utterly debased by political whimsy and point-scoringwhether from the

secular left or the Hindu right Id want that honour to be conferred, 25 y ears from today , on Sheldon

Pollock and Rohan Naray ana Murty .

The former, professor of Sanskrit at Columbia, is the general editor of the Murty Classical Library of India, a

series of translated volumes of classical Indian literature that has been funded by the latter, a computer

scientist from Harvard and the son (notwithstanding the missing h in his surname) of NR Naray ana Murthy ,

the billionaire co- founder of Infosy s. With an endowment from Murty of $5.2 million, the series has enough

capital in its vaults to keep going for 100 y ears, at the rate of five new volumes of translation per y eara

love-marriage of delicious elegance between new money and old glory .

Published by the Harvard University Press, the first five volumes of the series are now available for purchase.

The handsome hardbacks are steep, at between Rs 1 ,495 and Rs 1 ,695 per volume. But the paperbacks are a

dazzling bargain: Who could resist Surs Ocean (Sursagar) at Rs 495? That gets y ou 1 ,000 pages of the poems

of Surdas, the original Brajbhasha text (in Devanagari) on the left-hand pages and a superb English translation

on the right. Sarad samai hu Syam na aaye



The time is autumnstill, the Dark One has not come.

I cannot imagine what love spells were exerted

by some female foe to bar his way.

The volume has a dauntingly erudite introduction by John Stratton Hawley , professor of Religion at Barnard

College, that few lay readers will be equipped to comprehend fully . But Hawley s translation of Surdas

demotic poetry has a lightness of touch that makes reading a breeze: The sari flutters, revealing great beauty

/ a spray of nail marks on the breast How v iv id the language of longing, how timelessly erotic.

And how easily marred might the poetry have been by a clunky translation. But as Hawley and his editor,

Kenneth E Bry ant, tell us in the acknowledgments, the book has been four decades in the making. This volume,

as well as the others in the first flush of the Murty series, is nothing less than a monumental labour of love; and

it is a love, in the main, of Western scholars in Western universities for classical Indian literature. As Indians

squabble over whether the Gita should be Indias national book, and whether Py thagoras did nothing more

than rip off Indian mathematicians more ancient than he, scholars in the West go about their quiet business as

guardians of Indian culture, and of texts that are scarcely studied any longer in the land of their composition.

How else do we explain the fact the Murty Library volume of The Story of Manu (Manucaritramu)the finest

poem in classical Telugu, composed around 1620 by Allasani Peddana, the self-sty led Creator of Telugu

Poetry (Andhrakavitapitamaha)has never before been translated into another language? Not into Tamil, or

Hindi, or Bengali, or Malay alam. And y et here, Velcheru Naray ana Rao of Emory University and David

Shulman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem give us a limpid translation into English of Peddanas highly

amicable poetry .

If a woman doesnt have the good luck

of having a lover who is young and handsome

and who makes love to her whenever she wants,

who really loves her, what good is her beauty

and her youth? Why be alive?

There are over 500 pages of such lively observations, of candid homilies that remain as fresh as they were

when they first graced palm-leaf manuscripts in the time of Krishnadevaray a, a king lauded ceaselessly (and,

we are told, sincerely ) by Peddana.

The adulation of a monarch is the avowed purpose of another volume in the Murty series, Abul-Fazls The

History of Akbar, Volume 1 (known to us as Akbarnama). Edited manfully by Wheeler M Thackston, professor

emeritus of Persian at Harvard, Abul-Fazls tome can best be described as hagio-historiography . The author

is a cross between a Mughal Boswell and Herodotus, as well as a fulsome, full-time praise-singer. The

translator, in his introduction, flags the perverse difficulty of Abul-Fazls prose, which is in a parabolic sty le

that is far from immediately comprehensible; not only is the sty le difficult but he also coins new words and

uses old ones in novel way s. Thackston also alerts us to Emperor Akbars translation bureaumaktabkhana

which sponsored translations of works of Hindu learning into Persian, the language of the Mughal court.

(This is not unlike the credo of the Murty Library , taking works from the classical Indian canon and

translating them into English, the language of the worlds intellectual court.)

The most modern of the Murty books is Sufi Lyrics by Bullhe Shah, the 18th-century poet. Christopher

Shackle, the editor and translator, is emeritus professor of the Modern Languages of South Asia at Londons

School of Oriental and African Studies, and he makes clear that he prefers to spell the name of Punjabs finest

Sufi poet as Bullhe, and not Bulleh, heretofore the customary English transliteration. Intriguingly , the



original Punjabi ly rics are printed here in the Gurmukhi script, even though, almost uniquely in the modern

world, Panjabi is a biscriptal language. The preference for Gurmukhi over Persian-scripted Punjabi could, I

suspect, reflect commercial considerations: Harvard must believe that Indian readers of Punjabi, especially

the wealthy Sikh diaspora, are a bigger market for the volume than their Pakistani counterparts.

Like Surdas easy going Brajbhasha, Bullhe Shahs Punjabi glides unresistingly into English. Shackle refrains

from try ing to make English poetry out of the original Punjabi, setting himself, instead, the task of try ing to

convey the sense of the poetry in a consistent sty le of plain English prose that aims to steer a middle path

between off-putting formality and jarring colloquialism. The results are a respectful, handsome, and never

joy less rendition of the ly rics into English. Take this fragment:

Bullha, the mullah and the torch bearer both have the

same intent. They spread light to people, but are

always in the dark themselves.

Or this one:

I flee from those who have studied a little bit.

If someone discerning judges me, I tell him: I flee from

those who have studied a little bit.

Learned scholars are my brothers; those who have studied

a little bit drive me mad

I save my favourite volume for last. This, the Therigatha sty led in English as Therigatha: Poems of the First

Buddhist Womenis the shortest of the lot, and will be, to the many readers who encounter it for the first

time, the most beguiling of the Murty classics. These poems were composed in Pali over two millennia ago.

The translator, Charles Hallisey , senior lecturer on Buddhist Literature at Harvard, deems them as a

collection to be the first anthology of womens literature in the world. The therisor senior oneswere

ordained Buddhist women of some religious achievement, and he urges us to read their poetry not as a

historical document, nor even as literary exotica from a by gone age, but as liv ing literature with its own

clarity , truths and epiphanies. The poignancy of many of the verses cannot be denied.

The hairs on my head were once curly,

black, like the color of bees,

now because of old age

they are like jute.

Some verses are startling:

We were mother and daughter,

but we shared one husband,

I was afraid of what had to come from that,

it was perverse and made my hair stand on end.

Sexual urges, let them be cursed,

they are dirty, foul, dangerous,

and they were all right there

where mother and daughter shared one husband.

One is transported by these words: not to another time, for a mnage of this sort, while outlandish, is not

inconceivable today . Instead, one is taken to the midst of a private lifelived by mother and daughterthat



must have been turbulent, often toxic. How did these women arrange their lives? And who was the man they

shared? Was he happy ? Or did he, too, think his situation dirty , foul, dangerous? Somehow, I doubt it. Men,

surely , were av id and omnivorous even 2,000 y ears ago, when Pali was the language of love and lust.

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